The high speed rail project from London to Birmingham is a terrible idea, former Welsh Secretary Cheryl Gillan said as she launched a broadside against the Government.

The high speed rail project from London to Birmingham is a terrible idea, former Welsh Secretary Cheryl Gillan said as she launched a broadside against the Government.

She also revealed how the Prime Minister had made it known he wanted to appoint a Welsh Secretary who had a seat in Wales.

Mrs Gillan, a known opponent of the HS2 project as the proposed line goes through her Buckinghamshire constituency, also attacked the coalition for failing to deal promptly with the question of a third runway at Heathrow airport.

Sir Howard Davies report in to current aviation policy should be completed by the end of this year, she said, as she claimed the Government needed to introduce infrastructure projects now, in an apparent attack on chancellor George Osborne’s spending plans.

Mrs Gillan, who threatened to resign from her cabinet post if HS2 went ahead, also accused the Government’s Conservative leadership of pandering to the Liberal Democrats in her first interview since she lost her job last week’s cabinet reshuffle.

Speaking to Dermot Murnaghan on Sky News, she said: “Now the time has passed to hand [the post of Welsh Secretary] to someone else and that allows me to go back to my roots, if you like, and actually speak out about something that is affecting my constituency and that is this terrible HS2 project.

“I know the Prime Minister and the rest of my colleagues have known of my complete opposition to it. The premise of Government is that there is collective responsibility and you have to do your duty and adhere to that.

“Unfortunately, I am liberated now so I could either see myself as a victim or as quite the reverse, I actually see it as a very exciting time in my political life.”

Asked for reasons to oppose HS2, she added: “This is not a Conservative project. First of all it is very destructive of the environment and secondly it’s not good value for money. The cost-benefit ratios have been moving out over the past two-and-a-half years since Labour announced this project.

“Quite frankly, this is so far in the middle distance that it is not going to affect the economic conditions we have now. What we need is we need a plan now for infrastructure, things like electrification of the main line down to Cardiff and the Valleys line that I lobbied for and got within Government for Wales.

“We need an aviation plan not that we have to wait for for another two-and-a-half years. The review needs to be completed by the end of the year. You can’t tell me that the Department of Transport hasn’t been looking at aviation policy and I think it would be quite possible that could be delivered by the end of the year.”

She said Prime Minister David Cameron had made no secret of the fact he wanted an MP who represented a seat in Wales in the post of Welsh Secretary. Mrs Gillan said she had a “very exciting front bench career” and insisted there was a place for women at the cabinet table.

Mrs Gillan added: “I know our two parties came together for absolutely the right reasons but I do think that we are spending an awful lot of time working to a Liberal Democrat agenda which includes as I see it as lot of time wasting on constitutional matters – AV, House of Lords reform.

“I don’t think that is what we need. We don’t want more constitutional reform. We all need a Government that works together and is joined up and focuses entirely on one thing which is the economy and all these noises off, all this peripheral subjects that keep coming up and constitutional tinkering, is not what my constituents want.”

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